Democracy Is A Pain

From April 2021

Kevin Williamson took to the National Review website earlier this week to argue against democracy. 

The proximate cause of Williamson's question--Why not fewer voters?-- is much of the debate about voter suppression in Georgia which, he says, "begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing." (Yeah, I had to look up ceteris paribus, which means "with other conditions remaining the same")

Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?

Williamson goes on to make an attempt to argue his proposal, bringing up the idea of "qualifications." But he can't help bringing in the real heart of his argument:

One argument for encouraging bigger turnout is that if more eligible voters go to the polls then the outcome will more closely reflect what the average American voter wants. That sounds like a wonderful thing . . . if you haven’t met the average American voter.

And there it is. There are Certain People who just shouldn't get a say.

As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out the next day, Williamson's argument is not a new one, having previously been embraced by pro-slavery folks before the civil war and Barry Goldwater's ghostwriter. Only the "better" voters should get to vote. 

And we have been hearing this argument in education for a while. Modern charters are often set to follow the visionary CEO model, where one guy should have unfettered say, not hemmed in by government rules of teacher unions or even teacher contracts. Being rich is supposed to bring freedom, so if I'm so rich, why should I have to listen to these not-rich people who try to exert their will by electing people who try to tell me what to do?? One of the key moments in this story is Reed Hastings, rich guy and charter school investor, back in 2014 telling the California Charter Schools Association that they need to get rid of school boards--

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…

Alleged lefties are not free from this. Union leaders often succumb to the impulse to "steer" members toward the "right" decision (eg the national union support for Common Core and the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton). 

And schools themselves are all-too-often distinctly undemocratic institutions, where administrators impose autocratic rule and everyone from staff through students is supposed to fall in line.

Because democracy is a pain. 

It's messy and annoying, in large part because it codifies our connections to other people. It sets down in rules the fact that we cannot simply divorce ourselves from all the people in the world who we think are unworthy.

Yesterday, Andy Smarick put up a piece at The Dispatch about the narrative of reopening school buildings, and while it provides a good solid dig through some surveys and polls, the bottom line is that despite various attempts to shape a narrative, when it comes to reopening buildings, people are mostly getting what they want. As the comments section makes clear, that's a real pain if you live in a community that mostly doesn't want what you want, or if your heart is set on All Of This being the work of your preferred group of Bad Guys. 

I suspect that everybody at one point or another dreams of being set free from the ties that bind them to other people (like, every four years in November). It's mostly the rich and powerful who can try to make that dream come true, and we periodically suffer through their attempts to do so. And I expect they feel kind of heroic doing it, fighting back against the mob or making the world a better place for all the Little People. But their gaze too often falls upon democratic institutions--like public education. 

Democracy is a pain. Teachers, working for boards filled with elected amateurs, certainly get that. But attempting to break down all collective action, to disperse public education, atomize parents into uncollected singletons, remove the collective obligation to provide an education--these are not good things. Trying to dissolve every collective so that nobody can get together to thwart your wealthy, privileged will--that kind of free-lance autocracy is not good for society (it's not even healthy for the wealthy, privileged people who pursue it).

In any society that values freedom, there will always be tension between my freedoms and yours, tensions between the will of the many and of the few. The solution is neither thunderdome or the hunger games. Democracy is a pain, but "every man for himself" and "I've got mine, Jack" and "Only my kind of people should get a say" are morally and ethically indefensible.